IntroductionXylose isomerase (XI) (D-xylose ketol-isomerase E.C 5.3.1.5) catalyzes the isomerization of D-xylose into xylulose as the first step of xylose metabolism in many microorganisms (Wovcha et al., 1983). It is also responsible for catalyzing the isomerization of glucose to fructose in vitro, and is an important enzyme in the food industry, used in the production of high fructose corn syrup. This is the reason why XI is also known as glucose isomerase (Jensen and Rugh, 1987;De Raadt et al., 1994). The fact that the enzyme isomerizes xylose to xylulose means that it could be used industrially for producing ethanol from hemicellulose (Wang et al., 1980;Ertunga et al., 2007;Karaoglu et al., 2013). Xylose, one of the major fermentable sugars in nature, is, after glucose, the second most abundant sugar in lignocellulosic biomass. Efficient fermentation of xylose is a necessary step in developing economically viable processes for producing biofuels, such as ethanol, from biomass (Zeikus, 1996;Schenck, 2000). For this reason, many XI genes appropriate for industrial applications were transferred to Saccharomyces cerevisiae